hey NCSA!(2:54pm EST Tue May 27 2003)i can think of better things to do with 70 PS2s and $50k… i would make it onto other top500 lists. - by freakky

It`s an amazing thing technology..(3:11pm EST Tue May 27 2003)So now that the Urbanaites have built they`re PS2 Supercomputer..what are they gonna do with it? Play global thermonuclear War? - by Insolent Puppy

Good choice(3:16pm EST Tue May 27 2003)The PS2 CPU is 128 bits plus it is relatively cheap at $180, compared to an Oppie, the cheapest of which is around $300. Wonder if we can wire a few of these babies together for a Linux desktop… - by supperman

supperman(3:38pm EST Tue May 27 2003)I'd like to see a PS2 benched against an Opteron. I'd honestly like to see that. Hell, how bout 2 of'em vs an Opteron?

I would bet that the Opteron would smoke the PS2's, but that's a sucker's bet. - by Nyeark

500 GFLOP(3:47pm EST Tue May 27 2003)What is that in polygons? - by pacc

Re:(3:56pm EST Tue May 27 2003)How many other 128 bit CPUS are out there…. none that I know of. At this scale, anyway. - by Mr Magoop

lol @ via(4:31pm EST Tue May 27 2003)nataku get a clue, 'eden' is weak low fpu performance, low memory bandwidth platform and piling those together hoping for supercomputer is as dumb as hoping to make a high speed vehicle by binding many bicycles together

and ps2 cpu is not 128 bit. its only memory - by dale

Re: Supperman(4:39pm EST Tue May 27 2003)This was on the Registers Site, the first link.

“Most Americans don't realise that each PlayStation unit contains a 32-bit CPU” - by The Observer

32 bit CPU + emotion engine(4:47pm EST Tue May 27 2003)The CNET site mentions that it is not the PS2's 32 bit MIPS CPU that the researchers are using for their calculations, but Sony's “Emotion Engine”.

“That custom-designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations per second”

That would probably beat out the Opteron, unless you had a graphics card that had similar math capability.

Also, they are running Linux. - by grapevine

Insolvent Guppy(4:51pm EST Tue May 27 2003)Urbanaites now constructs thus they`re is the ps2 giant computer what manufacturing industry their it goes to its this? It make the war in the game thermonuclear world? - by Insolvent Guppy

CNET article(4:58pm EST Tue May 27 2003)The CNET article says the EE does 6.5 billion/sec and a geforce does 50 billion /sec. I'd rather fork out for a geforce than 8 PS2 units + the price of the Linux kits.

This is more of a show and tell project, than anything. It has no real market value. 50K for 70PS2's? There's a deal. - by jo mama

Costly for Sony?(8:48pm EST Tue May 27 2003)If the PS2 is a loss leader like the GameCube and XBox, then these supercomputers better make up for their cost to Sony by being good advertising.(loss leader: item sold below cost to bring customers into the store (buying games, in this case)) - by Kev, a Swing Dancer

Good for Sony?(9:30pm EST Tue May 27 2003)Watch Sony use this news as a tactic in an ad where they wire up like 5000 PS2's to show how powerful they can be. - by Chicken Toker

RE: jo mama(12:25am EST Wed May 28 2003)I agree with jo mama: geforce, at this point, is more attractive than a PS2. PNY recently announced a PCI version of the geforce 5200 FX — while not the snappiest of the series, a lot of them can, in theory, be stuffed into one box. And the FX supports floating-point-per-color-component frame buffers. While operations are somewhat limited, combine that with some of the filtering operations and multitexture… in the right situations it will beat PS2, and can be programmed in Cg instead of PS2 vector unit assembly (which isn't easy. Even most highly optimized games don't take full advantage of both VU's) The PCI 5200 goes for about $106 street. The PCI backplanes might be (relatively) costly, not being a mainstreet item. Couple that to an Athlon MP dualie, clusters of these with gigabit ethernet…

Here's a backplane that supports up to 20 slots:

There are 4 weak links that I can think of: 1) PCI, at 32bit/33Mhz might be a little slow. Maybe someone will do a 64bit/66Mhz PCI version of the 5200.

3) Not sure if the floating point framebuffer formats of the Geforce FX are really the same as single precision float, or if they have some quirky limitations.

4) Finally, I don't know if the backplane can supply enough juice to 18 5200's — that might be pushing things, additional power is probably needed. I don't think the 5200 has the extra power connector on it (in the form of a 4 pin molex drive connector on the 5600, 5800, and 5900)

But I don't think this should stop us. Anyone want to scrape together some dough and try it out?

ps. Imagine being able to say: Dual display? Triple display? No, I have _18_ displays on my PC!- by groggy

groggy(2:12am EST Wed May 28 2003)Interesting. Perhaps they could use the Visiontek 9100 128mb PCI card, based off the ATI Radeon 8500LE. I think it's faster than the 5200. - by randumb

groggy(4:12am EST Wed May 28 2003)Branching logic / early out? Have you seen how programmable an ATI radeon 9800 is? This would not be a problem for them. Admittedly, 1 AGP slot/machine limits it, but I'm sure custom rigs could be made at a push. - by ATI

You would be hard pressed to beat $200 per node. Apparently the Emotion Engine had/has? a few benifits with I/O, instructions and registers over ATI or Nvidia GPUs.

I look forward to GPUs being designed specificaly for support of scientific calculations and for use in clusters. A 10G network daughter card option would be so cool. - by Zeke

re: randumb, ATI, Zeke(12:47pm EST Wed May 28 2003)Well, I picked the 5200 FX PCI for the blue sky machine because it has floating point framebuffer support. The 8500 might be faster, but I don't think it is from a generation that supports FP framebuffers.

I haven't actually programmed in Cg myself, but have been reading the Cg Tutorial. It is a very exciting developement, ideal for tinkering in. I guess I should have been more specific in stating that early out / branching is somewhat limited. On something like a vector unit (which I have some experience programming…) I'm free to program it much more like a traditional CPU. If the algorithm has an early out that tells me the next 50 calculations should all be 0, I can write a tight little loop that outputs all 0's as fast as memory allows. Or the packet header for a chunck of data could contain some precalculated bounding information that with one quick test tells me whether or not to bother processing, or how to process, the enclosed data. The VUs are also easily capable of generating addiontal data, such as patch interpolation, etc. Heck, the VU's are flexible enough to implement stacks and could even handle simple recursion. To sum it up, the VU's visibility is much higher, as it can randomly access 4K, 8K, 16K, or even all of main memory. The GPU, when programmed as a pixel shader, has much lower visibility (fetch a few texels, test alpha, test zbuffer, write to a single location in framebuffer) which greatly limits what decisions you can make at the time.

While I suppose you can do some simple branching on a GPU, it would quickly, I think, reach a point where a more traditional CPU/VU can execute these classes of algorithms faster.

Zeke, thanks for the link, that was very interesting reading. It sounds like for their test, a GPU was faster than a CPU if they ignore some of the driver issues (they stated that using a render target as a texture has a high context switch in the opengl driver they were using)

- by groggy

Been there done that(6:13pm EST Thu May 29 2003)I linked 3 ps2's at my friends house and it was not only cheap but it provided him with 18GHZ of processor power (compared to intel celeron processors). - by rem

Hey Rem(6:56pm EST Thu May 29 2003)wow rem, you could really kick but with SETI @ home. You'll find and alien before anybody with that setup. Let me know when you make contact buddy. - by jo mama

bvmbv(5:16pm EST Wed May 12 2004)ggfcyh - by jorge montes

my ps2(8:34pm EST Thu Dec 15 2005)i got a ps2 in a yard sale for 50 bucks turns out it wouldnt read the blue disks, so i turned it into eb games they gave me practicaly nothing for it so now i never shop there anymore. - by darth dude

play station2/supercomputers(1:48pm EST Fri Jan 13 2006)hi, i just learned to turn on a computer. For my cis 110 class i need to find out what possible future benefits this technology would have. i'd be very grateful for any info., please simple english, i'm computer challenged and dont know the talk. thanks for any help. - by dee